Property(2)

ON THE PRETENSE that she is of some use to me, I had Sarah in my room all morning with the baby she calls Nell, a dark, ugly thing, but quiet enough. He hates the sight of this one. It’s too dark to be his, or so he thinks, though stranger things have happened, and everyone knows a drop of negro blood does sometimes overflow like an inkpot in the child of parents who are passing for white, to the horror of the couple and their other children as well. Somehow Sarah has prevailed upon my husband, with tears and cajoling, I’ve no doubt, to let her keep this baby in the house until it is weaned. At first she had it in the kitchen, but she was up and down the stairs a hundred times a day, which made him so irritable he demanded that I do something about it. I told Sarah to bring a crate from the quarter and put it in the corner of my room, which earned me one of her rare straightforward looks that I take to mean she’s pleased.

It was so hot, I had her fan me. So there we sat, I with my eternal sewing, Sarah plying the fan, and the baby sleeping in her box. She has rigged the box out absurdly with a ticking mattress stuffed with moss and covered by a rag quilt. She even tacked a loop of willow across the middle to hold up a piece of mosquito net. “Is she a princess?” I said when I saw this ridiculous contraption. “If she not itchy, she won’ cry,” Sarah replied. This, I had to admit, was a reasonable assertion. It is one of the annoying things about her; on those occasions when she bothers to speak, she makes sense.

After a while the baby whimpered. Sarah took it up to suckle, holding it in one arm and working the fan with the other. She had pulled her chair up behind mine so I couldn’t watch this process, but I could hear the nuzzling, snuffling sound, mewing a little now and then like a kitten. I don’t understand why she is so determined to suckle this one, as it will be passed down to the quarter as soon as it’s weaned and sold away when it is old enough to work. He won’t get much for her. Ugly, dark little girls aren’t easy to sell. It would be a good joke on him if he had to give her away.

Eventually I grew bored and tried talking to her, a largely hopeless enterprise. “You went down to tend to Leo?” I said.

“I did,” she replied.

“Is he bad?”

“He’ll live.”

“Who did the whipping?”

“I don’ know.”

So much for conversation.



AT DINNER HE was gloomy. The new rollers for the sugar press have come. He spent the morning trying to get them installed and cut his hand badly in the process. It is all Sutter’s fault because he couldn’t use Leo, who has more experience with the press than anyone on the place. He had to call in two boys from the field who didn’t know their right hands from their left and couldn’t hold up their own pants. If Sutter wanted to whip boys near to death, he said, why couldn’t he choose worthless ones like these two and not the only useful negro on the place.

When Sarah brought the potatoes in, he took a spoon from the bowl straight to his mouth and then spat it into his plate. “Are we not possessed of a warming dish in this house!” he cried out. Sarah picked up the bowl, pulled the plate away, and headed for the door. He wiped his mouth vigorously with his napkin, swallowed half a glass of wine. “I swear she puts them in the icehouse.”

I looked at him for a few moments blankly, without comment, as if he was speaking a foreign language. This unnerves him. It’s a trick I learned from Sarah. “Since there are no servants presently available, Mistress Manon,” he said, “I’ll have to prevail on you to serve me some meat.”

I got up, went to the sideboard, and served out a few slices of roast. When I set the plate in front of him, he attacked it like a starving man. Sarah came back in carrying a bowl wrapped in a cloth which sent up a puff of steam when she opened it. He grunted approval as she spooned a portion onto his plate.

I went to my place but couldn’t bring myself to sit down. “I have a headache,” I said. “I’ll have dinner later in my room.” He nodded, then, as I was leaving, he said, “I would like to speak to you in my office before supper.”

“Would four o’clock be convenient?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied through a mouthful of food.



HE PRIDES HIMSEL on being different from his neighbors, but his office looks exactly like every planter’s office in the state: the good carpet, the leather-topped desk, the engravings of racehorses, the Bible with the ribbon marker that never moves, employed as a paperweight, the cabinet stocked with strong drink. I kept him waiting a quarter of an hour to irritate him. When I went in he was sitting at the desk poring over his account books. He does this by the hour, totaling up long lists of supplies and others of debt. Without looking at me, he observed, “Someone is stealing corn.”